AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

Top comment by mistersquid

One of my all time favorites. Can’t remember where I first read it (Quora?), but it’s currently my top Google hit for “balloon programmer project manager joke”. [0]

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A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:

"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."

"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.

"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below says, "You must be a project manager"

"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2rn8qx/i_h...

2. Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?

Top comment by matt_j

I spent 6 months in lock down in a 1 bedroom apartment in Australia. Working from home. 1hr outdoor/exercise a day. No more than 5km from home. We had pretty strict rules. I went for a walk around the block with my mate once a week and spoke to my family on zoom once a fortnight and that was about the extent of my social contact for a large part of 2020.

I managed pretty well. I'm a naturally introverted person, which is perhaps a good trait to have in this situation. I'm already used to spending a lot of time by myself and I have things I like to do. This is key, I think. I spent long hours making DJ mixes in Ableton and playing records on my hi-fi. That's a creative place for me and it was very satisfying to have the time to bury myself in it.

I wrote code, not heaps, but I played around with a few things.

I dug up some old/remake computer games (Half Life Black Mesa was by far the best)! I watched a bunch of old films I haven't seen in years, and a few bits and pieces on Netflix. I read books. I went for a 1hr walk every day and enjoyed the sight of trees and the sound of birds. I said a sincere thanks and smiled with my eyes at the people who staff the stores I shopped at once/twice a week. They have a hard job and I think it's important to convey gratitude to them.

I'd be lying if I said it was all fine, there were definitely days when I was bored stiff, depressed or otherwise not in a great place, but it was helpful to remember that everyone was in the same boat, and my sacrifice, along with everyone else's, are what is going to pull us through.

Keep your chins up. Especially you guys in the USA. What a mess you have to fix over there. I hope this year is productive.

3. Ask HN: Is frugality underrated in startups?

Top comment by pembrook

Rule #1 of business:

You can generate revenue to infinity, but you can only cut costs to zero.

This alone means that a bias toward frugality will probably cause you to spend time on the wrong things. It's the equivalent of a freelance developer who charges $100/hr spending 5 hours on Amazon trying to save a couple bucks on an iPhone cable. Cool, you saved $3. But you spent $500 to save it!

Of course, if you haven't found product-market fit, frugality can help give you more time to find it. But once you have a proven business, frugality is a death sentence. While you're trying to save $20/month on your email marketing tool and $50 on cheaper coffee for the office, your competitors will be spending their time and money to acquire your customers.

Generally, you get what you pay for. So if your gut is to always pick the cheap option, you're going to be using bad tools and hiring bad people, and creating bad products.

4. Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?

Top comment by paxys

People are mentioning technical & payment processing hurdles, but those are all easy to figure out. Look at the gaming industry, mobile app stores, iTunes, online gambling, toll booths, tipping on various online platforms. Micropayments are most definitely already a thing, and have been for a while.

A better version of your question is – why do newspapers charge for a monthly subscription instead of a per-article fee? The simple reason is that the numbers just don't work out. They'd have to charge a lot per article and have people pay for a lot of them to break even with the current subscription or ad-supported model, and that's not going to happen. And even if it does, there would just be too much day-to-day variance in sales. The reason subscriptions are popular is that businesses like a steady, predictable stream of revenue.

5. Ask HN: Which are the best Go repositories to read to learn the language?

Top comment by nemo1618

The best Go source code is the stdlib. When you read stdlib code, you can be confident that nothing is there by accident. Every decision was made for a reason. When you're learning, that's invaluable, because it means you can "dig" anywhere and be rewarded for it, whereas "digging" into most codebases will often be a waste of time.

Also, I would advise actively avoiding the big names you have heard of. A lot of products are successful despite having garbage code. And even more of them are successful despite having only decent code, full of stuff not worth emulating.

Try to identify people who have a lot of experience and a strong command of the language, then look at their most recent projects.

6. Tell HN: 19yo, bootstrapped SaaS, 250k ARR after 10 months

Top comment by nugget

You're already in one of the best communities there is: Hacker News. Don't underestimate what you can learn just by carefully reading the threads here.

I went from "idea in my dorm room" to interviewing and hiring executives in their 40s and 50s within 24 months. The best lesson I learned is that there are way fewer "rules" than you think, and smart, disciplined, focused entrepreneurs can accomplish way more than they assume. It's reasonable to reflect on your inexperience in order to prevent mistakes, but you should never feel intimidated by it, or let other people intimidate you. The world (and YC's portfolio) is full of "inexperienced" people like you who have built billion dollar companies that disrupted industries and became pillars of the economy.

If you post contact information in your profile, I'm sure at least a few people with relevant experience would reach out and offer to be a resource for more specific advice. I've done that a few times here with mostly successful results.

7. Ask HN: Is Signal Down?

Top comment by neartheplain

Official confirmation:

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350118809860886528

EDIT: Interesting geographic usage data in the tweet replies. Most replies by far coming from Indian Signal users, many comparing Signal's reliability to WhatsApp. Also strong showing in the comments from Africa (esp. Nigeria) and the Middle East. I wonder how many joined Signal just recently in response to Facebook's changes to WhatsApp [0].

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-pr...

8. Ask HN: What is your low stress, high paid job?

Top comment by wolfretcrap

I own a farm in India. Indian people are moved by plight of poor farmers, which helps government subsidizes most of the inputs we require in farming. As most farms in India have pretty weak technology and automation, we are able to leverage subsidized inputs along with modern technology and produce yeilds as high as 20x the average yield.

Labor is cheap in India and it's easily found specially when we pay more for slightly more safer and comfortable work.

Supporting farmers is a sentimental thing for people in India so we are able to produce very large profits to the tune of several millions yearly in profit.

Previously I was a software engineer for a western company based in India it was very stressful job as you need to be available for Oncall troubleshooting anytime.

9. Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

Top comment by erik_kemp

1) Personal favourite: Collaboration between Fairphone and E-foundation https://e.foundation/fairphone-and-e-expand-the-availability...

2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/ (Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)

3) https://tutanota.com/

4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors

5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

6) Signal (https://signal.org)

7) https://brave.com

8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)

10) https://Plausible.io

11) https://small-tech.org/

12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/

Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.

Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)

10. Ask HN: Who has started a successful side business while having a full time job?

Top comment by testmasterflex

Do you work 9-5?

It’s actually not about time but about energy levels.

To be able to accomplish this, you setup your life to have maximal energy level balance throughout the day.

For me that meant to unfortunately leave my girlfriend at home almost every evening the past year to get a few hours in almost everyday until I was done.

This also included eating the same food (ready made from Lidl) everyday and just saying no to everything and everyone all the time.

I also recommend that you try to take as little responsibility you can at work and perhaps working from home if possible, where you then use half the day for your own stuff.

One of the few benefits of this lifestyle/endeavour is that you have an income while trying your startup idea.